Methodological Approach to Assessing the Salary Level in the System of Indicators of Economic Growth of Urban Agglomerations

Despite the active discussion of urban agglomerations both in the scientific environment and in the sphere of state regulation, there are still no unified methodologies to develop strategies for their development. The aim of the study was to substantiate the incorrectness of using average indicators to diagnose the economic growth of urban agglomerations and to propose an alternative approach to its assessment. To achieve this goal, the following tasks were solved: (1) to determine the level of average monthly wages of employees in urban agglomeration (excluding small businesses); (2) to calculate the distribution of the population by the level of wages on average across the entire territory of urban agglomeration without taking into account the structure of the economy of municipalities; (3) to calculate the distribution of the population by the level of wages in urban agglomeration taking into account the structure of the economy of municipalities. The paper proposed an alternative methodology based on the analysis of municipal entities that make up the agglomeration. The indicator of average monthly wages of agglomeration employees, which is singled out by the Ministry of Economic Development of the Russian Federation as one of the key indicators for assessing the economic growth of agglomerations, was studied. The results confirmed that the inequality of employees in terms of wages in the studied agglomeration was higher than the analysis of the average indicator determined. The study concluded that in order to develop agglomeration master plans and development strategies, a more in-depth analysis is needed, taking into account the economic structure of each municipality included in the agglomeration, and the average indicator calculated for the agglomeration as a whole is not sufficiently accurate.